Morning came to the complex the way mornings came to places that had been holding tension overnight. Gradually, and then all at once.
Lena was already dressed when the first servants began moving through the corridors outside. She had not slept. She had sat in the chair outside Caelum's door from the fourth hour until the grey light started coming under the gap at the bottom of the window at the end of the hall and then she had gone to her room and washed her face and changed into clean clothes and come back out and that was the sum total of what the night had been for her.
Her shoulder ached where one of the operatives had connected before she finished the engagement. Not badly. The kind of ache that reminded you it had happened rather than the kind that changed how you moved. She rolled it once inside her sleeve and left it alone.
She went to prepare Caelum's morning tea.
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